The biologist answer there seems to be question-begging
Yeah, I didn’t bother trying to steelman the imaginary biologist. I don’t agree with them anyway, and neither would you.
(I guess I was imagining the biologist belonging to the school of thought (which again I strongly disagree with) that says that intelligence doesn’t work by a few legible algorithmic principles, but is rather a complex intricate Rube Goldberg machine, full of interrelated state variables and so on. So we can’t just barge in and make some major change in how the step-by-step operations work, without everything crashing down. Again, I don’t agree, but I think something like that is a common belief in neuroscience/CogSci/etc.)
it seems hard for parallelization in learning to not be useful … why am I harmed …
I agree with “useful” and “not harmful”. But an interesting question is: Is it SO helpful that parallelization can cut the serial (subjective) time from 30 years to 15 years? Or what about 5 years? 2 years? I don’t know! Again, I think at least some brain-like learning has to be serial (e.g. you need to learn about multiplication before nonabelian cohomology), but I don’t have a good sense for just how much.
Yeah, I didn’t bother trying to steelman the imaginary biologist. I don’t agree with them anyway, and neither would you.
(I guess I was imagining the biologist belonging to the school of thought (which again I strongly disagree with) that says that intelligence doesn’t work by a few legible algorithmic principles, but is rather a complex intricate Rube Goldberg machine, full of interrelated state variables and so on. So we can’t just barge in and make some major change in how the step-by-step operations work, without everything crashing down. Again, I don’t agree, but I think something like that is a common belief in neuroscience/CogSci/etc.)
I agree with “useful” and “not harmful”. But an interesting question is: Is it SO helpful that parallelization can cut the serial (subjective) time from 30 years to 15 years? Or what about 5 years? 2 years? I don’t know! Again, I think at least some brain-like learning has to be serial (e.g. you need to learn about multiplication before nonabelian cohomology), but I don’t have a good sense for just how much.